One of Vin Scully’s favorite stories featured a Houston resident

Vin Scully, the peerless Hall of Fame announcer who died Tuesday at age 94, spun dozens of baseball stories and anecdotes during a lifetime in in the booth but chose a personal tale involving a high school friend that turned out to be among his final spoken remembrances.

That story, from May 13, 1952, lives still in the heart of its subject, longtime Houston resident Larry Miggins, who joined all of baseball Wednesday in paying tribute to the greatest voice of the game.  

“You’ve probably never heard of Larry Miggins,” Scully wrote in an April 24 Twitter post. “We became dear friends in high school. Years later, he’d hit a home run against the Dodgers that remains the most personal I ever called. Pull up a chair. This is the story.”

Scully went on to describe a day sitting with Miggins, who was a year ahead of him at Fordham Prep in the Bronx, spinning high schoolers’ dreams of future greatness.

“We talked about what we hoped to do,” Scully said. “He hoped to become a big league ballplayer. I hoped to be a broadcaster, and we wondered what were the odds of us making those goals.

“Well, would you believe (in) 1952, the St. Louis Cardinals came to Ebbetts Field in Brooklyn, and who is in the lineup? My friend Larry Miggins. I’m on the air, and I’m going to broadcast an inning in which he is coming to bat. Sure enough, and he came up, and would you believe, he hit a home run which I described off lefthander Preacher Roe.

“As Larry around the bases, I could not believe a billion to one shot has occurred directly in my lap. That is the one I will never forget.”

“That story,” Scully said a few years ago, “always strikes home with young people. I tell them, ‘Don’t be afraid to dream. Don’t think, “Oh, well, I could never do this, or that never could happen.’”

Miggins, 96, hit only two major league home runs in an 11-year career spent mostly in the minors, including four seasons with the Houston Buffs. He and his wife, Katherine, had 12 children, including eight boys — enough, including Larry, to field a team called the Miggins Nine — and  spent 21 years as chief of the probation and parole division for the Southern Division of Texas.

“We met when he was a junior in high school,” Miggins said of Scully. “We would see each other when he came to Houston. He was a warm fellow. Everybody knew him. He was so kind and decent to everybody.

“There’s a place in heaven for him.”

Scully made many trips to Houston over the years to call Dodgers games against the Colt .45s and Astros, none more memorable than a 1989 Dodgers road trip built around Scully’s duties calling ABC’s Saturday game of the week.

He called a 10-inning game for ABC between the Cubs and Cardinals, then hopped a charter plane to Houston, arriving just before the first pitch of an Dodgers-Astros game that lasted 22 innings. The next day, the teams played a 13-inning game.

When he left the Astrodome broadcast booth after the Sunday game, Scully said he was greeted by a telegram from his friend, longtime San Diego baseball writer Phil Collier, that read, “Lou Gehrig was a wimp.”

It’s one of many stories about Scully that will continue to resonate in his absence, all of which may be best summed up by one of Katherine Miggins’ favorite poems, “Farewell, But Whenever You Welcome the Hour” by the Irish poet Thomas Moore.

It concludes:

“Let Fate do her worst, there are relics of joy,Bright dreams of the past, which she cannot destroy;Which come in the night-time of sorrow and care,And bring back the features that joy used to wear.

“Long, long be my heart with such memories filled!Like the vase, in which roses have once been distilled –You may break, you may shatter the vase, if you will,But the scent of the roses will hang round it still.”

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